[ { "id": 204393, "series_id": 26, "series_slug": "histsyn-rashkb-journal-engine", "series_title": "RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊", "series_use_hku_proxy": false, "document_key": "RAS-1962", "page_number": 25, "title": "RAS-1962", "content_text": "16\n\nF. S. DRAKE\n\nIn A.D. 489 the Theological School at Edessa was closed by the Roman Emperor Zeno. In A.D. 496 the Nestorian Catholicos (or Archbishop) of Nisibis was made Patriarch of the East with his seat at Seleucia-Ctesiphon, the capital of Persia on the Tigris, and the Persian Churches with their own Patriarch were henceforth independent of the Patriarch of Antioch.\n\n4\n\nIt is doubtful how far the split was due to theological differences, and how far to patriotic motives. Although the name 'Nestorian' is commonly applied by others to this ancient independent Syro-Persian Church, it is not the name by which they describe themselves. And in fact they were probably little conscious of the theological differences indicated by the name. They were conscious rather of being a Church outside the bounds of the Roman Empire; their Patriarch was the Patriarch of the Christians of the East, and they called themselves the Church of the Chaldees. Some still call them the Chaldaean Church. But this name has now become attached to a section of them that has become incorporated in the Church of Rome. Some call them the Assyrian Church, and this perhaps is the name least liable to cause confusion. Their centre was in fact, and is, the mountainous country of Kurdistan, east of Mosul (the ancient Nineveh) and of Arbela, where Alexander defeated Darius and commenced the conquest of Persia (331 B.C.). The sturdy peasants, who under the Persian Empire after an initial acceptance, endured a period of bitter persecution, and who maintained their primitive faith and life derived from the early days, are in all probability the descendants of the ancient Assyrians.\n\nAfter the conquest of Persia by the Moslem Arabs, the seat of the Patriarch was moved in A.D. 762 to Bagdad, the new capital, at that time a centre of learning and science, where at first they lived on good terms with the Mussulman despot. During the next five hundred years the Nestorian Church was allowed to go on its own way, sometimes with kindly recognition from liberal caliphs, sometimes harassed by harsh tyrants, but still all the time a recognized institution within the territory of Islam.\n\nWith the Mongol invasion Hulugu, grandson of Genghis, took Bagdad in A.D. 1258 and put an end to the Eastern Caliphate.\n\n7 Adeney, op. cit., p. 494.", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1962.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/9s166f47f", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 204394, "series_id": 26, "series_slug": "histsyn-rashkb-journal-engine", "series_title": "RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊", "series_use_hku_proxy": false, "document_key": "RAS-1962", "page_number": 26, "title": "RAS-1962", "content_text": "NESTORIAN CROSSES\n\n17\n\nHe himself was the son of a Christian mother and he had a Christian wife, both from the Kerait tribe in north-eastern Mongolia, whose king had been converted by Nestorian missionaries in A.D. 1007. The era of communication between the Mongol Khans and the Popes and Princes of Europe commenced. At the end of the 14th century Bagdad was sacked by Tamerlane, as also were Aleppo and Damascus. He savagely attacked the Syrian Christians many of whom fled to the inaccessible mountains of Kurdistan, where they have lingered to the present day.\n\nIt was the break-up of the ancient Syrian Church. About which Harnack writes:\n\nThe Syro-Persian Church deserves our unqualified sympathy. It was the only large Church which never enjoyed the official protection of the state. It maintained the traditions of Antiochene exegesis, it translated the works of Christian antiquity into Syriac with great assiduity... It also assimilated Greek philosophy and science which it transmitted to the Arabians. At the present day it is crushed, impoverished, and down-trodden, but it can face its downfall with the consciousness that it has not lived in vain, but upon the contrary that it has filled a real place in the history of civilization.\n\nClaudius Rich visited the remnants of this Church in the mountains north-east of Mosul in 1820, including the 4th century Convent of Rabban Hormuz in its rocky gorge, and left a graphic description of the austere life and primitive worship of the dusky monks pursuing their manual labour in the remote solitude.10\n\nHenry Layard made a more extended visit to the same region a few years after the great massacre of the Assyrian Christians in 1842 by a fanatical Turkish Bey, when the threat of a second attack was already impending. He saw the ruined homes and churches, and the bleached bones still lying at one of the worst scenes of massacre; and he attended the simple worship and sacrament of the people a few days before a second indiscriminate massacre took place. He described with approbation the 'unadorned and imageless walls', the 'simple and primitive rites', 'the hospitality and simple manners of the priests'\n\n* Adency, op. cit., p. 495.\n\nHarnack, The Expansion of Christianity in the First Three Centuries, Vol. 2, p. 150.\n\n10 C. R. Rich, Narrative of a Residence in Koordistan, London, 1836.", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1962.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/9s166f47f", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 212126, "series_id": 26, "series_slug": "histsyn-rashkb-journal-engine", "series_title": "RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊", "series_use_hku_proxy": false, "document_key": "RAS-1990", "page_number": 68, "title": "RAS-1990", "content_text": "45\n\ngroup, headed by the Nestorian patriarch. Although they were not permitted to convert Moslems, Nestorian missionaries were otherwise given a free hand, and by the end of the twelfth century Nestorian churches could be found in Egypt and Cilicia, in Persia and Mesopotamia, in India, Ceylon and Socotra, and in much of Turkestan. All these churches, organised into at least twenty, and possibly as many as thirty, metropolitan provinces, recognised the authority of the Nestorian patriarch or catholicus, who ruled from Baghdad, the capital of the Abbasid caliphate.\n\nThe Nestorian church enjoyed a final period of expansion under the Mongols. For a while, during campaigns against Moslem enemies, the Mongols saw that Christian support could be valuable to them, and the Nestorians were able to take advantage of the Mongol unification of Asia from the Euphrates to the Sea of Japan to establish themselves in strength in China in the second half of the thirteenth century. The Nestorian church now reached its greatest geographical extent. But appearances were deceptive. As Mongol power waned throughout Asia the vacuum was filled not by Christianity, but by Islam. The Nestorian church in China did not survive the Mongol Yüan dynasty, and in central Asia most Nestorian Christians apostasised in the face of Moslem persecution in the middle years of the fourteenth century. Any surviving communities of Christians were almost certainly either wiped out or converted to Islam during the terrible campaigns of Timur Leng towards the end of the fourteenth century.\n\nApart from a tiny offshoot in India, the church which dominated Asia in the middle ages survives today only in Kurdistan, uneasily placed astride the borders of the modern states of Syria, Turkey, Iraq and Iran. Emigration from Kurdistan during the last two centuries has also created a Nestorian diaspora in the United States, Europe, and Australia. The total membership of the Nestorian church was reckoned in 1989 at about 1,770,000.\n\nThe Nestorians in China\n\nFor more than two hundred years during the T'ang dynasty (618-906), and for a further sixty or seventy years during the Mongol Yüan dynasty (1260-1368), Nestorian Christians could be found in significant numbers in China. The dates are not entirely certain. As far as the T'ang period is concerned, the first officially-recognised Nestorian", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1990.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/d79206299", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 212128, "series_id": 26, "series_slug": "histsyn-rashkb-journal-engine", "series_title": "RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊", "series_use_hku_proxy": false, "document_key": "RAS-1990", "page_number": 70, "title": "RAS-1990", "content_text": "47\n\nthe Ch'ung-fu-ssu or Office for Christian Clergy, was set up in 1289 to supervise their activities, and this body is last heard of in 1351. The Ming revolution against the Mongols in the 1360s, which swept through China from south to north, was strongly nationalistic in character, and references to foreigners in Chinese cities cease after these cities passed under Ming control. The Mongol capital Khanbalik (modern Peking) fell in 1368, and China thereafter retreated into a long period of isolation from the outside world. Nestorian Christianity was now spent, and the next wave of Christians to arrive in China, nearly two hundred years later, were Roman Catholics from Europe. They came by sea, as it was now no longer possible to travel overland through Central Asia, and they found that the work of evangelism had to begin all over again, as scarcely the faintest memory of Christianity had survived in China.\n\nThe number of Nestorian priests in China was never large. In the T'ang period they probably numbered a few thousand at most. As we have seen, Wu-tsung's decree of 845 gives a figure of about 3,000 foreign monks, and a slightly earlier Buddhist work asserts that the grand total of Manichean, Nestorian, and Zoroastrian monasteries in China was smaller than the number of Buddhist monasteries in a single small city. In the Yüan period, according to a census taken in the 1290s, Mongols and other foreigners in China accounted for as many as one person in thirty-five of a total population of seventy-two million. Even so, the number of Nestorian Christians in China was estimated by John of Cora in 1330 to be no higher than 30,000. This estimate may be slightly low, but it is clear that it is on the right lines.\n\nThe Nestorian missions to China have generated an extensive and often romantic literature, and much, probably too much, has been claimed for the effectiveness of their missionary activity. In T'ang China the Nestorians had the Christian missionary field to themselves; in Yüan China they were joined by missionaries of the European Latin church. On both occasions the influence of Nestorian Christianity on China appears to have been insignificant. The major, if impermanent, missionary achievement of the Nestorian church beyond its heartland in the Tigris and Euphrates valleys and the hills of Kurdistan, was not in China, but in Arabia, India, and Turkestan. The mission to Turkestan was particularly important: the ethnic character of the Nestorian church, at first predominantly Syrian and Persian, was substantially modified between the ninth and fourteenth centuries.", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1990.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/d79206299", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 212140, "series_id": 26, "series_slug": "histsyn-rashkb-journal-engine", "series_title": "RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊", "series_use_hku_proxy": false, "document_key": "RAS-1990", "page_number": 82, "title": "RAS-1990", "content_text": "59\n\nall had their scriptures'; but no other faith could now be confused with the Christians' 'brilliant teaching'. Also, though this may be a mere coincidence rather than a tactful regard for continuity, they chose a new term which sounded in Chinese very similar to the term previously in use. They chose an intriguing variant of a common Chinese character in order to catch the eye. The man who invented the term 'brilliant teaching' had a rare gift for public relations, and a high degree of sensitivity to Chinese culture.\n\nEnough evidence exists to suggest that the term 'brilliant teaching' was invented and actively promoted, both in the capital Ch'ang-an and elsewhere in China, by Adam, the composer of the Sian tablet inscription. In the following sections it will be argued that Adam invented the term 'brilliant teaching' not long before 781, that he launched the term publicly in the Sian tablet inscription, that he strove to have the term applied consistently in all the dioceses of China of which he was archbishop, and that he ordered old manuscripts to be recopied and 'doctored' so that they reflected the new terminology.\n\nAdam, Nestorian Metropolitan of China in 781\n\n6\n\nVery little is known for certain about Adam, the Nestorian metropolitan of China in the 780s. The name Adam seems to have been very rare in the Nestorian Church, and it is possible that Adam's parents were not Nestorians. All we can confidently conclude from the Sian tablet inscription is his rank. The inscription begins with the Chinese sentence 'Written by Ching-ching, a monk of the Syrian monastery', which is followed by a corresponding sentence in Syriac: Adam qasisa ur apisqupa u papasha de Tzinisthan, “Adam, priest, bishop, and archbishop of China'. We know from the Book of Governors, a ninth-century history of the Nestorian monastery of Beth Abhe in Kurdistan, that the monk David was sent out to China as metropolitan around 800. He may well have been Adam's immediate successor.\n\nFortunately, we can go a little further in building up a picture of the author of the Sian tablet inscription. Adam is also mentioned in a contemporary Chinese work as the recipient of a stinging rebuke from the emperor Te-tsung (779-805) for an inelegant translation of a Buddhist scripture which he had undertaken in collaboration with a Buddhist monk. The story is told in a biography which records the journey of the monk Prajna from northern India to Ch'ang-an in 782.", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1990.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/d79206299", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 216257, "series_id": 26, "series_slug": "histsyn-rashkb-journal-engine", "series_title": "RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊", "series_use_hku_proxy": false, "document_key": "RAS-2003", "page_number": 16, "title": "RAS-2003", "content_text": "Gillian Bickley, Ph.D., is an English writer, teacher, and speaker, who has lived in Hong Kong for over thirty years, teaching at the University of Hong Kong and the Hong Kong Baptist University. She taught previously at Universities in Nigeria and New Zealand, and has lectured throughout Britain, the USA and Asia (gbickley@hkbu.edu.hk).\n\nSidney C. H. Cheung, is Associate Professor, Department of Anthropology, The Chinese University of Hong Kong. His research interests include visual anthropology, heritage and tourism, indigenous people, food and identity. His published books include On the South China Track: Perspectives on Anthropological Research and Teaching (Hong Kong Institute of Asia-Pacific Studies, 1998), Tourism, Anthropology, and China (White Lotus, 2001), and The Globalization of Chinese Food (Curzon Press and University of Hawaii Press, 2002) (sidneycheung@cuhk.edu.hk).\n\nEric N. Danielson, studied modern Chinese history under the guidance of Professor Kent Guy at the University of Washington in Seattle, where he earned his History B.A. in 1988. Later, in 1994 he earned his History M.A. from George Washington University in Washington, D.C. He has previously published works on Kurdistan, Yugoslavia, and China. He was the co-author of The Yangzi River and the Three Gorges, sixth edition published by Odyssey Guidebooks of Hong Kong in August 2001. For the past six years he has lived in Shanghai, where he has worked as an education consultant and academic manager in China's rapidly growing private education industry (ShangConsultant@netscape.net).\n\nMichael Gillam, joined Dartmouth Naval College in 1945 at the age of 13 and continued his service in the Royal Navy specialising in Minewarfare and Diving. The first of his many visits to Hong Kong was in 1952 as a midshipman en route for the Korean War. Among his subsequent appointments was a year in Iran setting up a diving school in the Caspian Sea for the Imperial Iranian Navy and two and a half years in Singapore with responsibility for diving throughout the Far East Fleet. He returned to Singapore at the end of the 60's as Staff Operations Officer to the Inshore Flotilla that included responsibility for providing Coastal Minesweepers to act as the Hong Kong guard ship.\n\nxvi", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-2003.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/2v242g390", "rank": 0 } ]